Rovio Mobile Developing A Lighter Version For Lower-End Devices

Angry-bird craving consumers have spoke and Rovio Mobile is listening. Rovio has decided to develop a lighter version of Angry Birds, one of the best-selling apps for Android, so that lower-end devices and other un-supported devices will be able to download and install the game. This is great news for the small percentage of users who reported errors trying to run the game.

Initially, when Angry Birds was released in October, Android users were hungry to get a hold of the popular game. In fact, they caused the servers at Getjar to crash momentarily due to the large amount of downloads! Of course, a lot of this was due to the fact that Angry Birds wasn’t initially available in the Android Market until a few hours after it’s release. Getjar reported over 90,000 downloads in a matter of 3 hours.

Fragmentation has been a key part to this issue with Rovio. Some users have reported blank screen and performance issues when trying to play the game. A few of these issues were addressed with the Angry Birds update earlier this month including support for QVGA screens. However, some users were still without being able to even install the game. We have received feedback from users who couldn’t search for the game in the Android Market.

Currently, Rovio lists 17 Android devices that are not officially supported. Most of the unsupported devices run Android 1.6 or custom ROMs. Even a few of the newer devices are having issues such as the T-Mobile G2. Rovio wasn’t necessarily thrilled at the idea of developing a different version for other devices “but judging by the feedback we have received, we feel that by providing a lightweight solution, we are doing a favor for our fans”.

We’re happy to see that Rovio is listening to the community and doing what they can to resolve the issue for the extremely popular game. Rovio hasn’t announced a release date yet but hoepfully we can see the light version as well as a ad-free paid version sometime this holiday season.